Archives for May 2014

AccessSolicitor, the fast-growing UK online legal directory, recently announced that it had joined just a handful of legal comparison websites in the UK to have achieved the ‘self-regulatory’ standards of the Legal Services Board.

According to AccessSolicitor, the company successfully made its case to the legal regulators at a roundtable in March 2014 hosted by the Legal Services Board and the Legal Services Consumer Panel.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel was established to provide independent advice to the Legal Services Board, the independent body responsible for overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England, about the interests of consumers of legal services.

In 2012, the Legal Services Consumer Panel published a report on comparisons websites in the legal sector and developed a set of good practice standards.

The latest news comes after a busy year for the startup.

In December 2013, AccessSolicitor partnered with the legal education program Lawyers in Schools to provide pro-bono marketing support to help the organization reach firms and businesses.

And in October 2013, Access Solicitor joined up with the University of Westminster Law School to develop a new algorithm technology that will recommend the best lawyer for a customer’s needs.

The AccessSoclitor website underwent a makeover and relaunched with a new design in August 2013.

AccessSolicitor currently features almost 14,000 UK-based legal professionals.

As well as solicitors, the site lists direct access barristers, legal executives, licensed conveyancers, and probate practitioners.

The site enables consumers and businesses to find lawyers in the UK using criteria such as specialization and location.

As well as the directory component, a series of legal guides covering subjects such as immigration and employment aims to educate consumers and small businesses about how to find a lawyer.

It is free to use for consumers and small businesses.

The business was founded by Warren Smith, who started out practicing technology law at Denton Wilde Sapte, before working in-house in the media industry.

AccessSolicitor is backed by several investors and venture capitalists.

What has happened to the largest and best known legal directory in the world?

The once-dominant force in legal directory publishing.

In a piece by consultant Stephen Fairley, the author asks “Are Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com Dead? Why Every Martindale Client Should Care” – accompanied by a picture of Doctor Death looming over Martindale’s corpse.

Two events in late 2013 solidified the view, that while a going concern, Martindale is now so different to its previous form, that it is in essence is no longer the same product.

The job losses were announced by Martindale owner LexisNexis, which said that the roles would be performed in the future by the Internet Brands team in El Segundo, California.

The joint venture sealed what had been happening for some time: Martindale’s transition from a traditional legal directory product to a marketing solutions company for smaller law firms – mostly in the United States – offering services like website design, hosting, SEO, and lead generation.

Once just as well known among BigLaw and international law firm circles, Martindale had been moving away from larger law firms for some time, and now seems to focus almost exclusively on offering smaller law firms packages of online services.

Its transformation has been so marked that the difference between Martindale and lawyers.com, the latter traditionally the consumer focused part of the offering, has become less obvious.

A number of commentators addressed the concerns of thousands of law firms that have Martindale and Lawyers.com packages.

For example, per Stephen Fairley:

“How is Internet Brands producing the SEO, social media, or blogging content for the thousands of loyal law firms who continue to pay for these services every month when everyone who did the work was fired?”

“How do changes get made to attorney’s websites when the New Jersey building where all the workers who did this work is currently sitting empty and on the market?

“Why should law firms continue to pay for a listing on Martindale when nothing is being done to drive traffic to the website?”

According to reports, Internet Brands plans to grow Martindale-Hubbell.

Although it’s early days, and we shouldn’t be too quick to judge, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of that.

To be fair to Martindale, the company’s VP said in a recent interview with the ABA Journal that “we’re far from dead.”

This might all sound like the final whimpers of a dying animal, but let’s not forget that Martindale-Hubbell has existed in some form since 1868.

That’s incredible when you think about it.

In 1868, the British armed forces began a campaign against the Ethiopian Empire, and US president Andrew Johnson was impeached.

At its peak, Martindale carried around 1.2 million lawyer listings – probably 40 or 50 percent of all the lawyers in the world at the time – and had annual revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Most legal directories are nowhere near this scale.

Kevin O’Keefe at LexBlog reflected on its storied name in a blog post last year

“Martindale was an impressive publisher, a legacy company, that provided lawyers a valuable service for over 100 years. The Martindale rating was the gold standard. During my 20 years in law school and practice, every lawyer looked up lawyers and their rating – whether because they were on “the other side” or to find a lawyer with whom to associate.”

The modern era at Martindale began in 1989 when it was acquired by Reed International, the large UK-based publishing company, for $303 million.

As part of the sale, the private interests led by the Carolan family that formerly controlled Martindale, ceded power to a more corporate style of management.

Richard Carolan, a prominent Armenian-American who died in 2002, was chairman and CEO of Martindale-Hubbell until shortly after the Reed deal.

Even back in 1990, there was an indication of the direction Martindale would take over the next 20 years.

The deal announcement at the time talked of “synergistic benefits” for Martindale-Hubbell and R. R. Bowker, another publisher that was acquired by Reed in 1985.

A senior R. R. Bowker executive was appointed to lead Martindale-Hubbell after the corporate takeover.

Post-acquisition, Martindale maintained a strong presence around its traditional headquarters in New Providence, New Jersey, but over the next 20 years, it got subsumed into the huge Lexis Nexis operation with its global tentacles.

Martindale’s parent company is the massive Anglo-Dutch listed multinational, Reed Elsevier (formerly Reed International), which announced annual revenues of $10.1 billion in 2013.

It’s hard to believe that a business with such deep pockets and 150 years of brand building behind it couldn’t figure out how to make a legal directory work in the modern world.

I’m sad that such a venerable name has effectively been handed to a consumer business without the same pedigree in the legal sector.

Sure, Internet Brands is a successful business, with tons of websites attracting gazillions of hits.

And, yes, I know it’s a joint venture, not a sell out, but it feels like Martindale has given up the ghost to me.

When I got in to the legal sector in the late 1990s, Martindale was still regarded as the legal listing/directory of record for most lawyers and law firms around the world.

It was hugely influential.

So how did we end up here?

Martindale’s current plight stems from the early part of the 2000s.

The Internet

The internet has not been kind to Martindale.

Although it moved online quickly and had a strong web presence long before most other directories, the democracy of the web weakened Martindale’s once-powerful brand, which was established in the pre-internet print era.

These days, people typically turn to Google and other search engines rather than go direct to legal directories like Martindale or Lawyers.com.

As a result, law firms started to plow resources into their own websites, search engine optimization, and other digital marketing initiatives.

Expensive

Martindale was expensive, eye wateringly so at times.

Large law firms were regularly hit with six and seven figure bills for directory listing packages throughout the 90s and 00s.

I was involved in the decision to cancel or reduce Martindale listings at a couple of law firms.

They were difficult decisions, because the firms still wanted to advertise in many cases– they didn’t want to cancel their listings – but the fees became impossible to justify.

Martindale had corporate mouths to feed and was often unwilling to negotiate much.

Inefficient

As well as the profile listing fees, large firms had to employ staff to manage the onerous task of completing and updating the attorney bios and profiles.

This was fine when Martindale was the definitive place of record for lawyers worldwide, but as law firms developed their own websites, this became an expensive and inefficient duplication of effort.

Law firms started pouring their energy into their own websites from the early 00s onwards, rather than working on Martindale.

Recognized Practitioner

A ‘Recognized Practitioner’ handles notable matters and/or has received some recommendation during the course of our research. However, they have not received a sufficiently high level of sustained recommendation to be included in the printed version of the Chambers guide. Instead, the ‘Recognized Practitioner’ category shows that these individuals are on our research radar. ‘Recognized Practitioners’ do not receive independent editorial comment, but they are able to provide a biography for our website.”

In other words, they are lawyers and firms that didn’t quite make it in to the “main list” this time around, but received sufficient market feedback to justify some official recognition.

I’m not clear why Chambers didn’t simply add an extra tier on to the bottom of each list, but I suspect they’re mindful of not over-stratifying and over-complicating the tables, where the definitions between tiers, particularly in the lower reaches, can be pretty marginal anyway.

The structure probably gives them more flexibility with potential new entrants – a sort of “wait and see” holding area – rather than adding new lawyers straight to the main list and then maybe having to consider dropping them the following year (which they’d rather not do).

There’s also the broader issue that the number of lawyers engaging in the Chambers process and seeking to get ranked has grown hugely in the last 10 years.

The bar for entry gets higher every year, so, as well as just expanding the size of the main lists, they’re looking at structural ways to accommodate the increased demand for lawyer listings.

Chambers has always had an internal watch list, it’s just now you get to see some of the lawyers publicly that have moved on to their radar screen, whereas before they were hidden from view.

A number of lawyers I work with have been recognized in this way for the first time this year.

While, ideally, they would like to be in the main list, they’re broadly happy that they’re in the list in some form rather than not in at all.

Directory feedback is cumulative, and presumably, the recognized practitioners stand a better chance the following year of moving into the main list with a baseline of positive market feedback, rather than starting from scratch.

The 100-attendee gathering at New York’s Del Posto on May 1 2014 was organized as part celebratory luncheon, part awards ceremony, and part discussion forum for general counsel.

Best Lawyers featured 2,627 New York City-based attorneys in the latest edition of The Best Lawyers in America, now in its 20th edition.

Of that number, 368 are women, and seven of those were named “Lawyer of the Year” and honored at the New York event.

Former Attorney Deputy General and WilmerHale partner Jamie Gorelick delivered the keynote presentation.

Also on the in-house panel discussion were Jeanine Arden-Ornt, head of legal at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; Monique Forrest from Beiersdorf; Emily Kim from Success Academy Charter Schools; and Laurie Levin, chief legal officer of Florida Hospital.

The initiative was led by Meredith Hinshaw, Best Lawyers’ director of publications and creative services in the company’s New York offices.

Meredith explained to me that Best Lawyers was looking to do something a bit different with its women in law program.

“Although there are more women in leadership positions in law firms now, a common theme among the female attorneys we spoke to was: ‘it’s better than it was, but still bad’. So we felt we should do something in an intelligent way. We didn’t just want to take the female lawyers from our lists and sell ads against them, but to bring the best female lawyers together through a small, selective gathering.”

Meredith said that feedback from the first event had been positive, and there are plans to expand the concept and roll out similar events in other cities.